He’s No Hero, but He Played One in His Neighborhood

Her name was Kitty Genovese, and although I had to look up the precise details this week, her name and the memory of her death have stuck with me these 30-plus years. She was 28 and living in Queens, N.Y., in 1964 when she was attacked outside her apartment. Despite her screams for help as she was repeatedly stabbed, and the subsequent revelation that numerous people must have heard her, no one came to her aid nor called police.

The night she died, Genovese became a symbol for a city--if not a country--where people wouldn’t help their neighbors anymore. “I don’t want to get involved” became the legacy of the Genovese case.

No doubt there have been countless examples since then of people looking the other way. It’s a dangerous world out there and, sometimes, only fools rush in.

Just as obviously, though, countless others have come to the rescue of neighbors and strangers, even when the wiser course might have been to go hide under the bed.

Which brings us to Ray Angerilli, a 64-year-old retired air conditioning engineer and salesman, who was puttering around his backyard pool last Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when he heard shouts.

At 4 in the afternoon on his quiet street of Saint Croix in Laguna Niguel, Angerilli could associate shouts only with youngsters playing in the streets. Trouble seldom came to this street that ends in a cul-de-sac.

The shouts, though, began sounding more like screams, and Angerilli went through the house and, in his stockinged feet, out the front door to the street. He saw a neighbor woman--he thinks he might have met her once years ago--and her daughter standing on the roof outside a second-story window. She was across the street and about three houses down, screaming bloody murder.

Angerilli remembers her yelling, “Call the police! Help me! Call the police!”

He dashed back inside and called 911, but he couldn’t tell the dispatcher what was happening, other than to say he thought the woman had also yelled that there were armed men in the house.

Speaking for myself, about this time I would have found something to do in the basement and disappeared for good.

Angerilli did not. “At that point, it had been a good three, four or five minutes,” he said. “I figured if anyone was going to shoot them off the roof, they would have done it by now.” So, seeing that the frightened 6-year-old girl was trying to climb off the roof, he crossed the street to help.

“I was afraid they were going to roll off the roof, and they would have come down on the driveway,” Angerilli said. First, he told the woman to hand her daughter to him, which she did. Angerilli told her to run across the street and hide behind a car. “I wanted her out of there,” Angerilli said. Her mother, still screaming hysterically on the rooftop, wouldn’t climb down.

Angerilli returned to his house, put his shoes on, and got a ladder and a couple of blankets. He ran back across the street and helped the woman off the roof. Police arrived and, as Angerilli correctly guessed, the intruders had disappeared.

Although his wife now playfully calls him “my hero,” Angerilli will have none of it. He says he thought things through and believed that the bad guys surely had fled by the time he got involved. “I figured if they hadn’t shown themselves or tried to shoot her by that time, they must have taken off,” he said. “So, I felt a little safer. Then I could hear the sirens coming, so I felt even safer.”

I promised Angerilli not to call him a hero. I meant it, because it smacks of condescension to call someone’s deeds heroic if they don’t meet that standard. That’s like watching a TV show and hearing the host call a guest “brilliant” just because they can formulate coherent thoughts.

So, no proclamations here for hero status for Angerilli. Instead, just his own words: “She was screaming for help. Nobody was coming. I was here.”

Fine. He can say he didn’t see signs of danger. He can say he didn’t see shotguns sticking out windows or furtive figures darting around.

All I know is he couldn’t have known for certain that the coast was clear. He couldn’t have known for certain someone wouldn’t come rushing out the front door with a gun, making him a sitting duck in the middle of the street.

Instead of heading for the nearest closet, Angerilli headed out into the street with a ladder.

Hero? Maybe not. I’ll pay him what I consider a supreme accolade: he was someone who chose to get involved.

Readers, of course, are free to confer their own title on him.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.